Trademarks + Brands by Corsearch

At the beginning of this year in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Claudia and Mike Milladge opened a bakery called Doughboy’s Bake Shoppe, naming it after Claudia’s father’s nickname. This week the Milladges announced its closing on the bakery’s Facebook page:

As China’s UrWork prepares to launch in the United States later this month, US-based WeWork has filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against the competitor. In the complaint, WeWork also included claims of false designation of origin and unfair competition.

The lawsuit, filed in New York, follows an earlier WeWork trademark infringement complaint against UrWork filed in London in July.

WeWork, which has referred to UrWork’s business model as “derivative,” claims that the UrWork name is “deceptively similar” to its own and will cause confusion in the marketplace.

Taylor Swift sings in the lead single from her album ‘Reputation’: “I got smarter, I got harder” and perhaps because of that, she’s filed some new trademark applications. According to TMZ, Swift’s company, TAS (Taylor Alison Swift) Rights Management has filed trademark applications for several song titles and phrases from the new album to use on merchandise, like recordings, clothing, entertainment services, phone charms, notebooks, and more.

Just how many trademarks does one singer/songwriter need? Swift already owns several, including these phrases from earlier songs:

This week’s update features news about .BOOK and .FASHION in Japanese, .BANK, .INSURANCE, .CLUB, and .SHOP.

The number of worldwide phishing attacks continues to grow, having reached an all-time high of 255,065 unique attacks in 2016, according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group’s (APWG) annual report, “Global Phishing Survey: Trends and Domain Name Use in 2016,” published this summer. 

Why is this important to IP professionals? For those that manage domain portfolios or monitor domain registrations, this is an important issue to understand because you have a role to play in defending your company or your clients from these attacks.

This wasn’t always the case. Over the past 10 years that the APWG has been publishing these reports, most phishing attacks have originated from compromised Web sites that had been hacked and used to execute these campaigns. However, the most recent data show that we’re experiencing an important new trend:  the use of malicious domain registrations to conduct phishing attacks is growing rapidly. As recently as 2012, phishing attacks from maliciously registered domain names comprised less than 9% of all phishing attacks worldwide. In 2016, nearly half of all phishing attacks originated from malicious registrations.